yearofplenty

Wendell Berry: Why planting a garden is the best place to start in caring for the environment

Picture: A front yard garden in Millwood from last summer.

Following up on my previous post from Wendell Berry's book "A Continuous Harmony," Berry suggests that there is no better place to start getting personally involved in the "cure of the environment" than by starting a garden. Here's his logic:

A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. The food he grows will be fresher, more nutritious, less contaminated by poisons and preservatives and dyes than what he can buy at a store. He is reducing the trash problem; a garden is not a disposable container, and it will digest and reuse its own wastes. If he enjoys working in his garden, then he is less dependent on an automobile or a merchant for his pleasure...

A person who undertakes to grow a garden at home, by practices that will preserve rather than exploit the economy of the soil, has set his mind decisively against what is wrong with us. He is helping himself in a way that dignifies him and that is rich in meaning and pleasure. But he is doing something else that is more important; He is making vital contact with the soil and the weather on which his life depends. He will no longer look upon rain as a traffic impediment, or upon the sun as a holiday decoration. And his sense of humanity's dependence on the world will have grown precise enough, one would hope, to be politically clarifying and useful...

We will see that beauty and utility are alike dependent upon the health of the world...We will see that war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues, but are aspects of the same issue...We will know that no person is free except in the freedom of other persons, and that our only freedom is to know and faithfully occupy our place - a much humbler place than we have been taught to think - in the order of creation.

Garden Vegetables Worth Trying: Asparagus Beans and Armenian Cucumbers

Every garden cycle we try some new vegetables in the garden and either add them to the annual rotation or abandon them because they weren’t what we hoped. For example, instead of filling the garden full of Yukon Gold potatoes that you can buy in the store really cheap, we plant fingerlings and purple potatoes. Instead of traditional dark green zucchini, we plant the yellow and light green/Armenian varieties because they have a much sweeter taste.

This year we tried Asparagus Beans and Armenian Cucumbers (pictured above) and they will both have a place in the garden next year. The cucumbers are huge but sweet and tender without huge seeds. The pole variety beans are a foot long and mild with small seeds. They are sweeter than regular green beans and slightly chalky when raw. We’ll cook them up tonight in a Thai stir fry. After stuffing ourselves with Kentucky Wonders and Royal Burgunys they offer a nice change of pace. If you haven’t tried Royal Burgundy beans, they are another winning experiment from last year. They are dark purple and turn green when you cook them. They taste just like regular green beans.

View From Our Garden

View From Your Garden - Brown's Addition

Reader A.Z. sent in this view from his garden in Brown's Addition, Spokane. Here's his description.

I live in a huge house that's been subdivided into six apartments. Of those, five are represented in our new community garden. We've got tomatoes, peppers, herbs, carrots, squash, green beans and lettuces growing. Plus some pretty fleurs in the middle of it all. This is my first time gardening, and I love it.

Keep the pictures coming.

View From Your Garden - Upside Down Tomatoes

Awhile back I invited folks  to submit some pictures of their gardens as the summer progresses. I plan on posting some of the pictures with an ongoing “View From Your Garden” segment on the blog. The pictures are starting to trickle in and thought I would get us started with a garden I ran across in the Millwood area. (That’s right, if you don’t send in pictures to the email address listed to the right, I’ll come to your home and take pictures myself.)

They have taken a plain old lawn and turned it into a raised bed garden. I noticed the upside down tomato plants on hangers. I’m not sure how those work but they seem to be all the rage this year. Let me know if anyone has had experience with them. If you’re limited by horizontal space in the yard, go vertical.

The View From Your Garden

Andrew Sullivan the uber-blogger has a series on his site called “The View From Your Window” where he invites readers of the blog to send in pictures of their view from a window. It has become a staple of his blog and provides a fascinating perspective of people’s lives from around the world. I’d like to propose a much more humble version of this concept, called “The View From Your Garden.” I spent a good bit of blog space last year sharing about our journey of tearing up our lawn and putting in a vegetable garden. I’d like to open it up for the readers of Year of Plenty and the DTE series of blogs to submit photos of the view from your garden. Show us your veggies and flowers as they evolve through the growing season.  I’ll take your shots and share them on the blog through the summer. Just make sure to let me know what part of the Inland Northwest or other region your gardening in. For example, don’t just say “Spokane”, instead say “downtown Spokane” or “Latah Valley” or “South Hill.” Send your pictures via the "email me" link listed to the right.

If you want some inspiration you can go here to Mark Turner’s collection of garden pics from Pat Munts’ gardening site.